Protection Or Free Trade

CHAPTER XXVIIL
FREE TRADE A3STD SOCIALISM.
THROUGHOUT the civilized world, and pre-eminently in Great Britain and the United States, a power is notarising which is capable of carrying the principles of free trade to their logical conclusion. But there are difficulties in the way of concentrating this power on such a purpose.
It requires reflection to see that manifold effects result from a single cause, and that the remedy for a multitude of evils may lie in one simple reform. As in the infancy of medicine, men were disposed to think each distinct symptom called for a distinct remedy, so when thought begins to turn to social subjects there is a disposition to seek a special cure for every ill, or else (another form of the same shortsightedness) to imagine the only adequate remedy to be something which presupposes the absence of those ills; as, for instance, that all men should be good, as the cure for vice and crime; or that all men should be provided for by the State, as the cure for poverty.
There is now sufficient social discontent and a sufficient desire for social reform to accomplish great things if concentrated on one line. But attention is distracted and effort divided by schemes of reform which though they may be good in themselves are, with refer-